Join the Toad for SQL Server Community!

I was just bragging about how Toad for SQL Server keeps getting better. In that post, I also pointed out a lot of great resources you can put to work immediately on improving your skills with this great tool. (Incidentally, there’s a freeware version without all of the features, but it’s still quite useful. And you can always use the beta product, if you want all of the features and many new features that are undergoing community testing.)

Ain't he handsome?

One of the reasons that Toad is so good is that it’s always been a community-driven product. Back when I used Oracle every day, TOAD was an acronym = Total Oracle Application Development. It didn’t take long for Toad to rise above the acronym transform into the eponymous term denoting “kick-butt database tool” just a few years before Toad began to go cross-platform. Now that Toad is solidly cross-platform with versions for DB2, MySQL, and Cloud to boot, it’s worth pointing out that Toad got to be what it is today entirely from community feedback. Back in the day, when I worked in Quest’s R&D team, the developers literally kept a checklist of cool suggestions from the community and worked against that to develop new features. My point isn’t to fully describe the inner workings of the Toad dev team, rather I wanted to highlight how incredibly important community feedback is to this tool and the developers behind it.